What seem to be the most important things to us about Thanksgiving in these days before the holiday? Dinner menus and lesson plans. Those topics ranked one and two in the “fastest-moving” searches related to Thanksgiving as reported by Yahoo!

Gary Brown

What seem to be the most important things to us about Thanksgiving in these days before the holiday?

Dinner menus and lesson plans.

Those topics ranked one and two in the “fastest-moving” searches related to Thanksgiving as reported by Yahoo! I’m not excited by that. The exclamation point is in their name.

In an e-mailed report, the Internet search engine Yahoo! said that searches for the “traditional Thanksgiving dinner menu” are up 786 percent in the last week. Accordingly, searches for “Thanksgiving side dishes” are up 287 percent in that period.

Searches for “Thanksgiving turkey” are down 8 percent, Yahoo! said.

Apparently, most of us have bought our birds. But searches for “Thanksgiving recipes” are up 70 percent, and searches for “easy Thanksgiving recipes” are up 89 percent.

The report indicated that searches for “terducken” were up 77 percent in the past week, while searches for “honeybaked ham” were up 93 percent. So much for tradition.

A multitude of other food searches were among the fastest-moving 25 Thanksgiving-related Yahoo! searches. Searches for simple “Thanksgiving meals” and “Thanksgiving menu” -- they apparently don’t have to be traditional -- ranked 10th and 23rd, respectively. Searches for “Thanksgiving desserts” ranked 13th -- far too low in the opinion of my sweet teeth.

Searches for the very general “Thanksgiving food” ranked 22nd.

But that search for “Thanksgiving lesson plans” was the second fastest-moving. Searches for one “Thanksgiving song” was third, and searches for many “Thanksgiving songs” were third and fourth fastest-moving. And searches for “Thanksgiving trivia” was fifth. Teachers, apparently, were scrambling.

The people at Yahoo! also listed 25 “top Thanksgiving searches.” Searches on the word “Thanksgiving” led that list, followed by searches for “Thanksgiving 2008.” In the last few moments before the arrival of holiday guests, I guess we stay pretty focused.

Or maybe it’s because we weren’t too focused in the previous weeks and months, because the fifth-ranked search in the last week was for the “Thanksgiving 2008 date” and the seventh-ranked search asked even more directly, “when is Thanksgiving 2008?” “When is Thanksgiving” ranked 21st. A modest enough number of procrastinators searched for “Thanksgiving day 2008” in the last week to make it rank 23rd.

Those who knew the date dwelled very much on food. Searches on the list sought out “Thanksgiving recipes” (third-ranked), “Thanksgiving turkey” (11th), “Thanksgiving dinner” (12th), “easy Thanksgiving recipes” (22nd), and “Thanksgiving menu” (25th).

Also on the list were searches for Thanksgiving crafts, clipart, coloring pages, wallpaper, pictures, cartoons, MySpace layouts and poems.

Lest all these secular searches make you worry that we’re dwelling only on the worldly, be assured that Yahoo! also recorded searches for “happy Thanksgiving” and “Thanksgiving prayer,” although they were ranked 19th and 24th.

These weren’t all last-minute searches, of course. Christmas is coming. Some searchers planned ahead.

According to Yahoo!, searches for “Christmas cookies were up 64 percent in the last week.

Contact Gary Brown at (330) 580-8303 or gary.brown@cantonrep.com.

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